To date, the market for specialist finance has continued to be driven – to a large extent – by the fact that more and more people nowadays may not meet the strict criteria of the high street banks, for a whole host of reasons.

In fact, recent research by the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association (IMLA) revealed that the specialist mortgage lenders’ gross annual lending had grown by 19% each year since 2009, which highlighted the extent of the market and the continuing growth.

This is largely because specialists can deal with more complex situations and cater for the growing numbers who fall outside mainstream lenders’ criteria.

At Together, we describe our philosophy as ‘commonsense lending’. What that means is that we can look at the whole situation and deal with each case on its own merits. Our customers may have unusual properties, complex income streams, atypical purchases – such as shared ownership or right-to-buy – or a combination of these factors and that’s where our expertise comes into play.

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In terms of growth areas, we’re anticipating that the self-employed will increasingly turn to specialist lenders, as very often they find it difficult to obtain finance on the high street, so we’re going to be looking at this segment of the market and ensuring that brokers are aware of our offering in this space.

We have also seen the recent PRA changes affecting the buy-to-let sector. The different lender requirements – which came into effect after 30th September when the PRA’s underwriting changes for portfolio landlords were introduced – will have a significant impact on the industry going forward.

Brokers will need to look out for lenders requesting more information than they have done previously on the properties a landlord owns in the background, as well as the property the lender is securing their loan against, so it’s likely we’ll see a move towards specialist lenders, as the mainstream may struggle to cope with the flexibility and personal approach, which will be required in a lot of portfolio landlord cases.

Earlier this year, we introduced new BTL products specifically aimed at portfolio landlords, and we’ll be continuing to review our products to ensure that we can support brokers and their customers as these changes come into effect.

Overall the outlook for the specialist lending sector is a positive one – as the IMLA figures showed – and the year ahead looks likely to see growth continuing.